Unified Communications

The UC space is alive and well even as it moves from the customer premise to the cloud. To learn more about the market I had a conversation with William Whearty (pictured), VP Sales & Product Marketing at Sennheiser where he told me their 70-year history of making microphones and headphones shows we know how to reproduce sound.

Now, the company is making an aggressive push into various segments of the UC market and is working to add certifications.

Face it, your customers don’t want to talk on the phone, they want to communicate with you the way they do with everyone else, using text. Sure, this is a generational issue but the young are getting older. Moreover, the parents and grandparents of all those kids have learned something very important in the past decade… If they want to communicate with their younger family members, they better buy a pair of reading glasses and learn to text.

But many companies aren’t prepared for a world where customers text them.

Cloud-based contact center solutions have been priced fairly uniformly in the past… You pay per seat and feature. You want to add more people or features such as analytics, etc. and you pay more. Some vendors offer an all-inclusive solution of course meaning the only variable is the number of seats but regardless, the model has been fairly static for the past few decades – starting back in the nineties when the term ASP was what we used to describe the space.

I had the chance to catch up with a top exec at a major Asian telecom equipment manufacturer and he told me customers are asking for NFV and they are busy working with a number of carriers in Europe to provide suitable solutions. This exec thinks that NFV will have the greatest impact in the gateway space. He went on to say he doesn’t believe the technology will have as much impact beyond the gateway because interoperability may become a problem – meaning whose throat is there to choke if things don’t work properly?

I’ve had a few conversations recently with analysts and resellers about how Microsoft Lync is getting trials in many of the largest global corporations and this has traditional telecom equipment providers getting nervous. From these discussions you might surmise that the future of telecom is going to be dominated by Redmond. We know however there is also a major competing force in the market… Cloud-based services. Moreover, Microsoft’s dominance as an operating system seems to be coming to an end due to the onslaught of Android, iOS and Chromebooks.

Bandwidth.com recently became just plain Bandwidth (no dotcom) as they unveiled a colorful new logo and announced an exciting array of products and services which support the communications ecosystem. The company's Republic Wireless division gives it strength in the MVNO space where its new Moto X supports both WiFi and cellular services powered by Sprint. Their wholesale solutions permit carriers to embed voice into their click-to-call apps and also allow an ILEC to become a CLEC without worrying about building out their own nationwide network. This UC service can be provided on a per-seat basis.

Recently, customers, vendors and competitors have been talking about Vocalocity - as one of the fastest-growing cloud-based communications companies. In fact just a month ago Syngergy Research produced a report detailing how fast the cloud UC market is growing and mentioned Vocalocity is growing must faster than the market at at 45% while the market grew at 22%. This puts the company just behind 8x8 and Shoretel - which acquired M5 Networks to get into the cloud space in terms of market size.

An article from Steve Anderson on a TMCnet sister-site explains some of the reasons for the growth:

The channel partner program offers a campaign syndication tool that gives resellers options in terms of collateral and promotions so that the individual resellers get some choices in what can be offered.

As tier 2 and 3 carrriers have started to face more competition from cable and larger SIP trunking providers, they have had to look to new markets in order to grow revenue. The challenge with this strategy is dealing with billing and management of a slew of new competitive services. Enter H2O Overgroup, a company helping these carriers with billing and backoffice operations. Evan Rice (pictured) the company's VP of Sales & Marketing spent some time explaining how the market is evolving, causing his company's customers to grow into numerous markets.

In case there was any doubt about the success of cloud-based telephony growing at the expense of customer-premise-equipment or CPE, the latest research out of Dell’Oro Group should serve as a wake-up call. Alan Weckel, Vice President of Enterprise Telephony research at the company had this to say, “If you look at 8x8, RingCentral, and Shoretel's acquisition of M5, combined they experienced growth in excess of 15% compared to 2Q12.”

ShoreTel has certainly been a visionary in the communications market – they were nimble enough to come up with a cloud solution which they purchased from M5 and are rapidly growing this part of their company as you can see from the research above.

Ben Irvine, the VP of Operations at the company’s cloud division recently told me 20% of customers are asking for cloud-based solutions off-the-bat according to the company’s partners.